Quotes from Ted Chiang

We shouldn't automatically accept that natural is better, nor should we automatically presume that we can improve on nature. It's up to us to decide which qualities we value, and what's the best way to achieve those.

When a Heptapod B sentence grew fairly sizable, its visual impact was remarkable. If I wasn't trying to decipher it, the writing looked like fanciful mantids drawn in a cursive style, all clinging to each other to form an Escheresque lattice, each slightly different in its stance. And the biggest sentences had an effect similar to that of psychedelic posters: sometimes eye-watering, sometimes hypnotic.

Louise?" "Hmm? Sorry, I was distracted. What did you say?" "I said, what do you think about our Mr. Hossner here?" "I prefer not to." "I've tried that myself: ignoring the government, seeing if it would go away. It hasn't.

If we say that an individual's character is revealed by the choices they make over time, then, in a similar fashion, an individual's character would also be revealed by the choices they make across many worlds.

The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we've led: none of them could have been predicted, because none of them were inevitable.

seal cylinder.

He waved his hand. "I do not sell passage through the Gate," he said. "Allah guides whom he wishes to my shop, and I am content to be an instrument of his will.

Science is not just the search for the truth," he said. "It's the search for purpose." And I had no response.

experience isn't merely the best teacher; it's the only teacher. If she's learned anything raising Jax, it's that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can't assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.

There were no other conspicuous orifices; perhaps their mouth was their anus too. Those sorts of questions would have to wait.

No es ninguna coincidencia que aspiración signifique al mismo tiempo tener esperanza y el acto de respirar. Cuando hablamos, usamos el aliento de nuestros pulmones para darle a nuestros pensamientos una forma física. Los sonidos que emitimos son simultáneamente nuestras intenciones y nuestra fuerza vital. Hablo, luego soy

Fate laughs at men's schemes.

The appeal of the theory was easy for me to appreciate, though; I too had devoted many an hour to examining flakes of gold through a microscope and can imagine how gratifying it would be to turn the fine-adjustment knob and see legible symbols come into focus.

Because all of us have been wrong on various occasions, engaged in cruelty and hypocrisy, and we've forgotten most of those occasions. And that means we don't really know ourselves.

They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.

If humanity is the central fact of the universe, if our species is the omphalos, then a close examination of the celestial sphere should confirm that privileged status. Our solar system should be the fixed point against which all else is moving; our Sun should be at absolute rest. If the evidence doesn't support that premise, then we must ask where our commitment truly lies.

The reality isn't important; what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.

Marco and Polo take a reading class with Jax and a few others, and they seem to enjoy it well enough. None of the digients was raised on bedtime stories, so text doesn't fascinate them the way it does human children, but their general curiosity—along with the praise of their owners—motivates them to explore the uses that text can be put to.

There were moments during this section of the climb when Hillalum despaired, feeling displaced and estranged from the world; it was as if the earth had rejected him for his faithlessness, while heaven disdained to accept him.

recession after the latest flu pandemic,

A company called Edgeplayer markets a digient torture chamber on the Real Space platform; to avoid accusations of unauthorized copying, they use only public-domain digients as victims. The user group has agreed that once they get the Neuroblast engine ported, their conversion procedure will include full ownership verification; no Neuroblast digient will ever enter Real Space without someone committed to taking care of it.

for like infernal fire, grief burns but does not consume; instead, it makes the heart vulnerable to further suffering.

La loro distaccata crudeltà, la loro istintiva capacità di individuare il punto debole nell'armatura emotiva di una vittima, il modo in cui la loro stessa amicizia veniva rafforzata dal sadismo: riconobbe questi come esempi di un comportamento umano, non divino.

If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.